KIPP Houston Adopts TeachBoost as Its Teacher Development Platform

We are excited to announce a partnership with KIPP Houston to provide our instructional leadership platform to all educators network-wide! This expansion will enable greater insight into teacher growth trajectories and instructional leadership capacity.

KIPP Houston will use TeachBoost's evaluation, coaching, and reporting tools to centralize the network’s processes, streamline its protocols, and track performance and growth across its staff.

We began our partnership with KIPP Houston in 2014, when KIPP Northeast Preparatory school leader Gillian Quinn implemented the software in her school. Quinn is widely regarded as an innovative leader, and her advocacy for the platform encouraged broader adoption across eleven more KIPP Houston schools over the 2015–16 school year.

“It’s critical that our teachers receive frequent, meaningful, normed feedback—that’s how we develop our staff and grow a stronger school,” shares Quinn. “With TeachBoost, we’re able to observe, deliver feedback, and see the growth our teachers are making. We use TeachBoost’s Insight reports to track growth over time, and those Insights help us validate our instructional coaching cycle. As a result, our teachers improve dramatically throughout the year.”

“From the outset, our work with KIPP Houston has been consistently rewarding,” says Jason DeRoner, TeachBoost’s CEO and Co-Founder. “School and network leaders approach evaluation and coaching from the standpoint of continuous growth and development, rather than orienting the work around punitive measures. We are excited at this expansion of our long-standing partnership with the network, because we have a shared vision around high-impact instructional leadership.”

“Teacher observations are the heart of a teacher appraisal system, and most importantly, the foundation of teacher development so all KIPP teachers can grow stronger in the classroom. TeachBoost gives us the tools to accomplish this.”

—Chuck Fimble

In addition to performing teacher evaluations on the TeachBoost platform, KIPP Houston schools leverage TeachBoost’s flexibility and customizability to model through software their unique approaches to instructional leadership and educator development. We profiled one such example of a personality-filled observation framework in an earlier blog post.

“The role of edtech in the growth and development process is not to do the work of the instructional leader, but rather to leverage automation, accelerate evidence collection, and embed expertise when and where educators need it most,” adds DeRoner. “The TeachBoost platform ensures that KIPP Houston’s instructional leadership initiatives provide the insights and resources needed to foster growth and development, as well as to build capacity and improve educators.”